Vanda Engine

Nowadays, creating and publishing a video game is a lot easier than in the past, as you can take advantage of a plethora of game engines that provide you with a development framework and most of the base components you need to get things started.

While many of the popular game engines used by developers require a substantial investment, there are open-source alternatives out there, one of them being Vanda Engine. It is a fairly powerful and very easy to use development platform for games and real-time interactive 3D.

Vanda Engine offers three operating modes: Prefab Mode, VScene Mode and Play Mode. You can create and store objects in Prefab Mode, switch to VScene mode to build a 3D level and then enable Play Mode to test the scene.

Once development has been completed, you can select all the VScenes that you wish to use, and then publish your project. The exported game can be distributed and played on any machine that meets the requirements, provided the necessary drivers have been installed.

Naturally, you first need to enter Prefab Mode and create all the objects you need to develop your game. These pre-fabricated objects can contain up to 3 LODs, which are collections of external scenes in COLLADA format, textures and PhysX colliders.

Pre-fabricated objects are stored in packages, and you can share them with your teammates if you wish to collaborate on a project.

Once all the necessary objects have been created, you can switch to VScene mode and begin putting everything together. Each project consists of multiple scenes, which can represent individual levels or distinct areas of design content.

Scenes are, essentially, a collection of prefabs, built-in objects, rendering effects and various other elements. Vanda Engine supports the Lua language, and you can assign scripts to triggers created with the program’s physics editor.

The last step consists of running the VScenes and Prefabs in Play Mode, which is mainly intended to help you test physics and scripts.

On the whole, Vanda Engine is a powerful open-source game engine that can be used by novices and experienced developers alike. It offers an impressive array of features, and it also comes with extensive documentation.